


Birdie

by seeminglyincurablesentimentality (myinnerchildisbored)



Series: Rose and Tommy - Bonus Material [6]
Category: Peaky Blinders (TV)
Genre: Fanfic in times of the Corona Virus, Fuckin' Quarantine, Hurt/Comfort, Influenza, Sickfic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-01
Updated: 2020-04-01
Packaged: 2021-03-01 02:54:18
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,386
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23428051
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/myinnerchildisbored/pseuds/seeminglyincurablesentimentality
Summary: It's early 1919, the Spanish Flu is on the move and Tommy Shelby performs his first act of proper fatherly heroism.
Series: Rose and Tommy - Bonus Material [6]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1602865
Comments: 20
Kudos: 63





	Birdie

**Author's Note:**

> I went to write another bit of distracting fluff...and then this happened. Bloody Cornona virus just gets into everything, eh? Now, this mentions illness and death and all that stuff we get slammed with from every angle right now, so if you've had enough of that, maybe be weary of this story. That said, if you think you could use a little Shelby-style encouragement in your life, this might be the business.  
> Hope you're all well and up to your eyeballs in tinned peaches.

“Orright?”  
  
They were having their breakfast – Rose and Finn and Ada and Pol and Arthur – when Tommy came down the stairs, buttoned and shaved, no part of him betraying the thick fog of a hang-over wafting through the back of his head.  
  
“Orright,” Finn mumbled through a mouthful of bacon, before forcing it down with a sore-looking gulp. “Are you eatin’ yours, Ro?”  
  
“You have it…”  
  
They stared at her, all of them, and watched as she pushed her full plate across the table towards Finn.

"Yea?" Finn asked incredulous. It hadn't been a week since Rose had stabbed him in the arm with her fork for trying the steal a mushroom of her at dinner.  
  
Rose rested her head in one hand and gave Finn a dismissive wave with the other.  
  
“Don’t you touch that,” Pol snapped, stopping Finn’s fork mid-descent.  
  
“But she said-“  
  
“Does your head hurt, Rosie?” Pol asked, taking no notice of Finn at all.  
  
“No?” Rose said weakly, but it didn’t escape Tommy that his daughter was squinting and turning her head at an awkward angle, away from the light streaming through the  
window.  
  
Pol reached across, put the back of her hand against Rose’s forehead and a small crease appeared between her brows.  
  
“Ah, fuck…” Ada muttered.  
  
“Right, you’re going up to bed,” Pol ordered Rose.  
  
“ ‘m fine but…”  
  
“Now,” Pol said. “Finn, out – no, wash your hands, then out. Rosie. Up. Now.”  
  
Rose pushed her chair back, being unbearably slow about it. Her eyes were nearly screwed shut now, she looked more hung-over than Tommy felt.  
  
“Come on,” he said. “I’ll take you-“  
  
“You’ll do no such thing,” Pol cut him off. “You down as well, that’ll be just what’s needed.”  
  
“Don’t be-“  
  
“Thomas-“  
  
“I’m orright…” Rose was on her feet now, shakily moving towards the front room and the stairs.  
  
“In Ada’s room, Rosie,” Pol called after her. “Straight in bed.”  
  
“Mine?” Ada asked with a distinct note of outrage.  
  
“We can’t very well keep her in with Finn,” Polly said. “Finn – out!”  
  
Tommy turned and saw Finn by the sink, still eyeing Rosie’s breakfast. He gave the bacon one last longing look and disappeared through the back door.  
  
“Right, kettle on,” Pol snapped as soon as the door had clicked shut. “Ada, chuck her food and scrub down the table. Chairs, as well, just to be safe. Get out of the bloody way, Arthur!”  
  
“What the fuck’s gotten into you?” Arthur pushed his chair back and stood back as Ada descended upon the table, steaming kettle and cleaning powder at the ready.  
  
Polly ignored him and started rooting through the top cabinet, pushing jars filled with dried herbs aside roughly.  
  
“Polly?” Tommy asked over the clattering of glass on glass.  
  
“You go open the shop,” she said without turning around. “We know what to do, we’ve done it before.”  
  
“I’ll go and open the fuckin’ shop when I know what the fuck is going on,” he wasn’t quite roaring, not quite, but he wasn’t far off.  
  
Pol spun around, a jar in hand, and glared at him like he was the biggest eejit on this side of the cut.  
  
“Flu,” she spat.  
  
He had to stop himself from taking a step back.  
  
“Fuck off,” Arthur’s voice drifted from somewhere near the door, his growl betraying just a smudge of uncertainty. “She’s caught cold, it’s been wet.”  
  
“Bully for her if she has, Arthur,” Pol said sharply. “But if it’s the birdie, we’ve got to keep her away from the rest of the house or we’re all fucked.”  
  
“You don’t know that-“ Tommy started.  
  
“D’you want me to wait til it’s gone through the house?” Pol looked at him, not a blink, not a twitch.  
  
She was right, of course she was; but the thought of Rosie upstairs alone, shut up in a bedroom and waiting for the fever to hit…it twisted his guts like no amount of whiskey and smoke could ever do.  
  
“She’ll be orright,” Pol said, her tone much softer. “She’ll sweat and she’ll sleep and with a bit of luck she won’t remember a thing.”  
  
“But-“  
  
“We’ve done this before,” Polly said. “And the less there’s sick the better we can look after them, so you stay away. It’s the right thing to do.”  
  
Suddenly, Tommy wasn’t at all sure how, he was going the way of his youngest brother, being hustled out of the door. It shut in his face and he stood out on the step, feeling all of ten years old. _Out you go, let the men do their talkin’._ And the women. Fuck.

#

Ada’s bed was too soft. It was swallowing Rose like a sinkhole. Like a man-eating plant. Like a tarpit full of dead cavemen. Like…  
  
Her head was hurting. It’d hurt quite a bit a minute ago at breakfast, but now it was really, really hurting. Rose hadn’t wanted to go to bed, but it seemed an impossible effort to disobey. And even though the bed was too soft – swallowing her like her uncle Arthur did with whole boiled eggs – it was still better than standing up.  
  
Rose rolled onto her back, looked up at the ceiling and felt tears race each other down the homestretch from her eyes to her ears.  
  
The door creaked open and in came a train robber, face hidden behind some kind of scarf.  
  
“Why you wearin’ that?” Rose asked shakily.  
  
“Felt like a change,” said Polly.  
  
She unfolded an enormous blanket and started to tuck it all around Rose, trapping her like a fly in a spider’s web.  
  
“ ‘s hot,” Rose complained, muffled by goose down.  
  
She turned her head and, through the mouth of the doorway, saw Ada dragging a mattress towards the stairs.  
  
“It’s too bloody heavy,” she yelled.  
  
“I’ll be back in one second, orright, sweetheart?” Pol set down a bowl on the bedside table, pushing a box of long stringy necklaces out of the way. “You close your eyes and see if you can’t sleep a bit.”  
  
She was gone before Rose could protest, clicking the door firmly shut behind her, leaving Rose stuck, hot and humming with something she didn’t care for at all.  
  
She felt a cough rise up from somewhere deep inside and forced it down. When Helen’s little sister had started coughing, not so long before Christmas, she hadn’t stopped until they put her in a box and into the ground. Rose shuddered despite the trap of the blanket. The ground had seemed an awfully big place for such a small box.  
  
There was an odd noise in the room now, a creak and a scrape and for one hysterical moment Rose thought of the earth dropping down onto the box – but then she turned her  
head towards the sound, just in time to see Tommy close the bedroom window behind him.  
  
He straightened his shirt and jacket, looked around the room for a moment and then came to sit on the edge of the bed.  
  
“Are you in there, Rosie?”  
  
“Yea…” Rose sniffed violently, suddenly ready to start bawling her eyes out. Something scratched the top of her head, digging through the mess of her hair. It was strange, but it  
was nice as well. Rose closed her eyes.  
  
“For fuck’s sake, Thomas-“  
  
Rose opened her eyes a little. The train robber had a kettle now and a sharp smell of brewing herbs was moving through the room like a raincloud.  
  
“Keep your hair on…” Tommy sounded perfectly calm, his hand never leaving Rose’s hair, scratching and scratching. “Just bring us up yesterdays ledgers when you get a chance. I can do them up here as well as down there, eh?”  
  
For a moment, Rose thought Pol would chuck the kettle at his head. Drag him out by the ear. But then, instead, she just sighed and put the things down on Ada’s dresser.  
  
“You remember what to do?” she asked.  
  
“Yea…” Tommy cleared his throat. “I remember.”  
  
Pol click-clacked from the room, shut the door and left them alone in the cloud of herbs. Rose rolled her eyes up until the could just glimpse her father over the edge of the blanket. There was a tiny twitch working the edge of his jaw, but when he turned to look at her, he had something very like a smile on his face. Like he was remembering how to do it.  
  
“Right,” he said, shrugging out of his jacket. “D’you want to be an egg, Rosie?”  
  
“Now?” she asked and as she did the cough she’d been holding escaped and rattled through the room.  
  
“Yea,” her father said when the echoes were gone. “I’ll build you a nest, eh?”  
  
For a moment Rose didn’t quite know what to say. She’d been all set for what Finn would have called ‘an absolute fucker of a day’; it seemed almost too fantastical that one’s fortunes could change so dramatically, and in no time at all.  
  
“Orright.”  
  
“Yea?” He was remembering how to smile properly now, she could tell.  
  
“Yea.”

#

Birds, or so Tommy thought, went about building their nests without ever having to really think about it. Everything in them knew what to do, there was no need for a bird to remind itself of the process. Their bodies knew, every bit of them; just like his own hands were halfway through soaking, wringing and folding the first towel with the mixture from the kettle before he’d given it any thought.  
  
He’d pulled Rosie up a bit on the bed, propped her onto two pillows, and she was watching him go through the motions, frowning slightly.  
  
“What’s that?” she asked as he approached with the steaming compresses.  
  
“D’you know what a malleefowl is?”  
  
Tommy put the folded cloths into the enamel bowl on the bedside table and pulled back the covers. Rose shivered and shook her head.  
  
“Fair enough,” he said, rolling down her stockings and pulling them off her feet. “You only get them in Australia. Champion nest builders, malleefowl, sort of bird I’d like to be.”  
  
“So, I’m a malley-foul egg?”  
  
“Spot on.”  
  
“Why?” Rose rubbed her bare feet together and Tommy thought he could feel the heat coming off them already.  
  
“ ‘cause mallefowl nests work like an oven,” he said, getting to work on the small buttons to get her dress off her. “So, they’re the birds we’re going to be, ‘cause otherwise, my little love, I’ll have to sit on you.”  
  
She grinned. He couldn’t believe it.  
  
“See, what the mallefowl does,” he went on, starting to wrap the hot cloths around her twiggy calves, “is they heat up their eggs inside the nest, with rotting leaves underneath and sand on top. So they can scratch around and go ‘bout their business until it’s time to hatch. Put your arms out for me.”  
  
Rose lifted her arms like they weighed a ton each and he put the largest of the soaked towels around her chest.  
  
“Orright?”  
  
“ ‘s hot,” she groaned.  
  
“It’s supposed to be,” Tommy said as lightly as he could. “Right, so. We’ve the leaves down, the egg’s in, now for the sand.”  
  
He piled her with blankets, sealing in the compresses and the stench of the herbs; cocooned his tiny daughter in heavy goose down and a couple of coarse woolen numbers for good measure.  
  
“Hot…” Rosie said again.  
  
“Eggs can’t talk,” he said.  
  
Eggs might not have been able to talk, but apparently they could scowl, even when their pale little shells were already starting to turn a splotchy red from the heat.  
  
The door creaked back open and Pol, scarf firmly in place over her mouth and nose, came in with a jug and cups and a box of papers.  
  
“Orright, sweetheart?” she asked.  
  
Rose stared glumly from the crack in the bed mountain.  
  
“Eggs can’t talk,” Tommy said again and even though half of Polly’s face was hidden, he could guess at the smile flashing beneath the fabric.  
  
“ _Kushti bak_ ,” Pol said quietly and then they were alone again.  
  
Tommy found a chair under a pile of Ada’s dresses and stoles, crammed the stuff into a spare corner of the wardrobe and pulled up a seat by the side of the bed. He dragged  
the box of paperwork over with his foot, found a pencil in his shirt pocket and started at the top. He’d barely scanned half a page when Rose let out a long, desperate groan.  
  
“Eggs,” Tommy said firmly, reaching into the nest to scratch her head some more, “have to be still and quiet and keep their eyes shut.”  
  
When he looked up from his work three pages later, Rose was asleep, her breath slow and deep, with only the smallest hint of a rattle. Barely anything at all. It was orright. He’d sit with her, do the work, keep his mind off the last time he’d kept watch like this.

#

Tommy was steadily making his way through the box of papers; Pol brought up soup and tea and honey. Rosie slept. It gave a man hope that she’d simply keep sleeping through the whole thing, but then, just as he’d opened the window so he could blow his smoke outside, a cough shook the bed. Like the hounds of hell all barking down in the sulfur, sending tremors up until it became an earthquake.  
  
Tommy threw his cigarette out of the window and whacked his knee on the bedpost on the way back to Rose.  
  
“Fuck-“  
  
She was boiling, she couldn’t breathe. Her eyes were still closed, but she was trying to sit up and couldn’t, the blankets were holding her down.  
  
“Fuck…”

Tommy ripped off the blankets, dragged his daughter upright. The towel slid off her chest, bone dry now and stiff with salt and dry herbs. Rosie gasped and retched and then drew breath so suddenly it made Tommy jump. Her eyes flew open and she breathed again and again, greedy, like the air was water and she’d just crossed a desert of foot. It was the sort of relief that a man hadn’t felt since Rose had drawn her first breath of all. It turned his legs to jelly and he sank down on the side of the bed like a drunk, just managing to lower Rosie onto the pile of pillows.  
  
“Orright?” he asked, a little out of breath himself.  
  
“I don’t wanna be a egg anymore…” Rosie whispered hoarsely, tears leaking down her cheeks.  
  
“Fair enough…”  
  
“Where’s Pol?” 

“Just down the shop,” Tommy said, casually he hoped.  
  
“Get her.”  
  
“She’ll be up in a bit-“  
  
“Please, get her?”  
  
“We’ve to change these-“ Tommy unwrapped Rose’s legs “- before anything else. She’ll be mad as hell if-“  
  
“She’s mad already,” Rose croaked miserably.  
  
“Won’t do to make it worst then, eh?”  
  
He had the towels back over the bowl now, pouring what remained in the kettle over the top. It wasn’t boiling anymore, but it was still hot enough.  
  
“Why is she?”  
  
Rosie’s voice sounded thick with phlegm and tears, it scraped a man’s insides raw.  
  
“She’s not,” he said. “She’s worried. Sometimes that looks the same.”  
  
“Why?”

“I’ve not invented faces, Rosie, I-“  
  
“No...” He heard Rose stifle a cough. “Why’s she worried?”  
  
He’d been good at this, in France, this business of instilling calm in people who’d every reason to be tearing their hair out with fear. Men had followed him into literal fuckin’ ratholes without particular concern for life and limb; even the ones who knew perfectly well how many of their comrades had breathed their last down there. The trick wasn’t to deny that there was something to be scared of, that would have been a lie too obvious to carry any weight; you had to let them know that there was danger ahead, and none too fuckin’ little of it, and then you had to make them believe that they’d be able to handle it. Pretend like you knew, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that there was no man alive in the world better prepared to do what had to be done.  
  
“ ‘cause you’re ill,” Tommy said. “And-“  
  
“Have I got the birdie?”  
  
He’d not expected her to interrupt. It threw him. There was something so matter-of-fact in her scratchy voice, it sent chills up his back.  
  
“Eh?”  
  
“I have a little birdie…” It froze him, towel in hand, unable to even keep wringing the fucker, the sound of Rosie’s flat little tune. “Her name was Enza – I opened the window – and in flew Enza…”  
  
Fuck it. Fuck this.  
  
“Rosie-“ He turned and found her looking at him, her eyes suddenly huge and glowing.  
  
“Maggie got the birdie,” she said solemnly.  
  
“Who’s that?”  
  
“Helen’s sister,” Rose said. “And she died.”  
  
Tommy made himself pick up the herb-soaked towel and started back towards the bed.  
  
“And Andrew Hatfield,” Rose went on. “And his mum. And auntie Martha.”  
  
He could feel her stare boring into him as he re-wrapped her legs and chest. He heaved the blankets over her, took a deep breath and met her eyes.  
  
“And they’re all dead,” Rose announced. “All of them.”  
  
“And d’you know why they’re all dead?” Tommy braced himself on the side of the bed, close enough to feel the heat coming off his daughter’s face.  
  
“ ‘cause of the birdie.”  
  
“No. ‘cause of bad luck.”  
  
He let it sink in, busied himself getting a washcloth drenched in cold water from the jug and carefully folding it to fit her small forehead.  
  
“Loads if people catch the birdie, Rosie,” he went on, watching her relax visibly as the cool seeped into her. “It takes more than gettin’ ill to die, you’ve to be unlucky on top of it.”  
  
She was mulling this over, he could tell. Her eyes narrowed ever so slightly and her dry lips were moving silently.  
  
“I’ve caught the birdie,” Tommy said quietly. “In France. Went through the men there like wild fire. Three-day fever, they called it.”  
  
“Did you die?” Rose asked.  
  
“What d’you reckon?” he asked back.  
  
A small, sheepish grin flashed across Rose’s face.  
  
“Why didn’t you?”  
  
“I just didn’t.” He shrugged, moved the cloth to the back of her neck. “Went down for the better part of a week, crammed into a corner of the field hospital. Day before I left, they brought in a lad who’d an ingrown toenail, put him in the cot next to mine. When they came to send me back out the next morning, they found he’d died in the night. Infection.”  
  
Suddenly he worried that he was frightening her, talking of people dying in the miserable, damp tents out amongst the barren vineyards; but Rose was just looking at him,  
listening, waiting for him to go on.  
  
“I got lucky,” Tommy said. “He didn’t. Simple as that."  
  
She considered this for a moment.  
  
“Am I lucky?” she asked finally.  
  
“Dunno,” he said. “Let’s see. How many kids d’you know, who’ve died?”  
  
He couldn’t see, because of the mountain of blankets, but Tommy would’ve put good money on Rosie counting off dead kids on her fingers under the covers.  
  
“Loads,” she said after a while.  
  
“More than you’ve fingers?”  
  
“Yea.”  
  
“D’you know why that is?”  
  
“Dunno,” Rose said.  
  
“ ‘cause kids die every day,” Tommy said. “They fall off roofs, they get trampled by horses, they catch the birdie or pneumonia or any other bloody thing that’s going round. Some of them trip over playin’ football, crack their head and are gone.”  
  
Rose’s mouth was hanging open slightly, her eyelids looked heavy.  
  
“The point is, you could’ve died loads of times already, my little love-“ Tommy put his free hand onto her head, the nest of her head warm enough to hatch an egg of her own “- but you didn’t. And you live bloody dangerously, don’t think I haven’t seen you running round on the roofs up and down the street. By rights you should’ve broken every bone in your body twice over by now, and your neck as well. But you haven’t. That’s a bit lucky, if you ask me.”  
  
“For a fact?” Her eyes were closed now and he could barely hear her.  
  
“For a fuckin’ fact, Rosie.”  
  
She fell asleep smiling and Tommy, hands shaking just a bit, went to the window to smoke.


End file.
